Hi Lambertus
I’ve checked all the possibilities. On the new maps:
I can search for POIs. I’ll get a list and can select what I need, whether hospitals, fuel, food, etc. The unit will also autoroute correctly.
I can search for cities. The list that is generated first is one that has the closest cities to my current location, and these are followed either by the 3-letter code ZAF, or the words “Cape Town”. When searching for a city by name, what’s different now is that the South African cities have a province after the city name, e.g., Gauteng, Western Cape or Kwazulu Natal. In the past they had a 3-letter code of ABC (presumably a country code; Great Britain was GBR and Germany was DEU, Netherlands was NLD). So, if I search for “Worcester”, I’ll get two hits. One is “Worcester, Western Cape” (that’s a town close to Cape Town), and the other is “Worcester, GBR” which is a town in the United Kingdom. Perhaps this is what’s causing the problem, and is related to how the data are entered into OSM?
I can’t search for street names or intersections. When searching for street names, my screen has three fields to enter data. The first is Street number. I always put in a “1” because our mapping is not yet at the stage where we have entered many street numbers on OSM. Then I would click to enter a Street name. At this point, on the old maps, my GPS would start an alphabetical list immediately, and would refine it until it converged to the right name as I added more letters. On the new maps the space where the list would normally appear remains “none found”. No names at all come up.
Searching for intersections also has three fields: Street 1, Street 1 and City. On the old map, as soon as I clicked to enter the first street, the list would be populated and would then converge as I added more letters to the name. Same would happen with the second name. With the new maps, both names return “none found”. No names at all come up.
On both those searches (street name or intersection), on the old maps, clicking on City name would bring up an alphabetical list of all cities in South Africa (perhaps only those on the specific map tiles that were loaded – I have not checked whether it was every city in South Africa). I would have to scroll to the correct city. If I tried to spell the city name, then I would also get a “none found”, so I generally never bothered to enter a city name.
Besides, I found that if I wanted to search for a street name on another tile, i.e., a tile that was loaded but was not the tile my current position was in, then I would have to move the cursor to that tile on the map first (change reference point), and then do the search. So if I wanted to search for a street in Johannesburg, which is on a different tile to the one for Cape Town, then a search would not find the street I was looking for unless I first zoomed out, found the correct tile on the map and placed my cursor in that tile.
I’m not sure if any of that information helps in making a diagnosis. On the weekend I’ll try load the new maps on a Nüvi 205. That unit used to do a search on the old maps. It didn’t ask for a city name first like some of the other GPS models do.
Thanks for the responses. I hope that there is a simple solution somewhere, and that this information can help towards making the search function on all GPSs work in future maps.
cheers
Stef